Build Guide: the extreme gaming PC

Power overwhelming, with a price to match.

Sometimes you just need to put games in their place. Forget about turning down the settings, lowering the resolution, or any other compromises. You want to build a PC to rival PC Gamer's Large Pixel Collider, but without all the decorative fluff. Whether it's 4K or 1440p 144Hz, all running at the highest quality you're likely to see this side of 2018, you're ready to join the upper echelons of gaming hardware.

Of course, you don't need to pitch the PC as a gaming build to the significant others in your life. Maybe you're building up your livestream YouTube and Twitch audience, or you need to do some real work like video editing, graphic design, or software development. An extreme gaming PC can do anything else you might need—it just happens to handle games really well.

Our high-end gaming PC is no slouch, but we can do better, and with some new components and a focus on pushing things to the next level, we're ready to assemble a PC most people only dream about. If you're looking for less extreme options, check out our other build guides on the right.

Intel's Kaby Lake and AMD's Ryzen processors are great CPUs, but we're pulling out all the stops. That means the new Skylake-X Core i9-7900X gets the nod as the fastest CPU that's currently available, particularly when it comes to gaming. 10-core isn't necessary for games, but a 10-core Intel CPU at 4.5GHz will easily beat AMD's 8-core Ryzen at 4.0GHz.

You can see the regional pricing for the components we selected in the above table, which will update in real time. Remember that you'll need two GTX 1080 Ti cards for SLI, which puts the price tag at the time of writing at a bit north of $5,000 / £4,600. Note that a display, keyboard, and mouse are not included in our build guides—but those links give our recommendations for each category.

Extreme Gaming Components

CPU: Intel Core i9-7900X

For most gamers, we shy away from Intel's so-called 'enthusiast' platforms, sticking instead with the mainstream offerings. While you can usually get everything you need from a Skylake / Kaby Lake build, the one area where you come up short is in PCI Express lanes. Z170/Z270 tops out at 16 Gen3 lanes from the processor, with four more DMI 3.0 lanes for the chipset. If you want to run multiple GPUs, they'll end up using x8 connections—unless you buy a more expensive motherboard that includes a PLX chip, but that doesn't fully overcome the PCIe lane limitation. A high-end 'enthusiast' processor on the other hand will double the number of PCIe lanes.

The X299 platform also more than doubles the number of CPU cores, thanks to the i9-7900X. Is this a reasonably priced upgrade over a Ryzen 1700? Hell no, but nothing about this build is reasonable! But looking at Ryzen performance with a single 1080 Ti, I wouldn't want to spend over three grand only to come up short on the CPU. While AMD's Threadripper should arrive soon, clockspeed is still a big factor in games and the i9-7900X can hit 4.7GHz on all cores (with the right motherboard and cooler).

We've argued both sides of the X99/X299 vs. Z170/Z270 debate, but ultimately there's only one choice for our dreamlike build, and that's going to be the new Skylake-X platform. With 10 CPU cores and 44 PCIe lanes from the CPU, you'll be set for the next several years at least. And there's definitely a benefit in some games—we've seen differences of up to 20 percent compared to a Kaby Lake platform when running GTX 1080 Ti SLI, and the additional cores are even more useful when it comes to other tasks.

Do you want to live stream a game without dropping frames? Or are you a budding videographer with a decent camera? Maybe you're hoping to become the next indie gaming sensation and you need a good PC for software development. Whatever your plan, the i9-7900X can outperform an i7-7700K by over 100 percent in applications that put the extra cores to good use. It's no surprise that our own PC gaming benchmark system uses hardware very similar to this build.

Motherboard: Gigabyte X299 Aorus Gaming 9

If the CPU is the brains of your new PC, the motherboard is the nervous system and other vital organs that actually keeps things running smoothly. Skimp on a motherboard at your own peril—especially when using multiple graphics cards.

The Gigabyte X299 Aorus Gaming 9 is the proverbial everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink approach to motherboards, with a sweet set of features. I had mixed feelings about the 'auto-overclocking' with my initial testing, but if you're building an enthusiast PC, getting stock performance of 4.5GHz on all 10 cores is great, and 4.7GHz with a good cooler was also possible. The X299 Aorus Gaming 9 also includes three M.2 slots, 802.11ac WiFi, dual gigabit Ethernet, RGB lighting, five reinforced x16 PCIe slots (though you'll need to pay attention to lane allocations, depending on your CPU choice), and more.

The only catch is the sticker shock, as this is a $500 motherboard. Gigabyte's X299 Aorus Gaming 3/5/7 motherboards drop a few of the features, with the Gaming 3 coming in at $280 without all of the bells and whistles. Asus and MSI also offer multiple X299 boards at various prices, but for an extreme build the Gigabyte Aorus board is an impressive tour de force.

Graphics Cards: 2 x GeForce GTX 1080 Ti

Titan alternative

There have been enough high-profile games with lackluster multi-GPU support during the past year that some people will prefer running a single GPU. The 1080 Ti is the fastest card, and it can mostly handle 4K ultra at 60 fps. Drop the second GPU if you don't want to deal with SLI headaches and non-supported games, and don't even think about 3-way or 4-way SLI.

More than anything else in an extreme gaming PC, the graphics card—or cards—matter. In sticking with my 'not entirely insane' mantra, I've elected to go with the GTX 1080 Ti rather than the Titan Xp, since the latter costs nearly twice as much and is only about 5 percent faster. If you really want an SLI Titan Xp build, though, have at it!

I've intentionally left the specific model of GTX 1080 Ti up to the user, because all of the 1080 Ti cards fall within a narrow performance spectrum. For an SLI build, some people prefer blower coolers that vent heat out of the case, while others are fine with large open air coolers, and still others like liquid cooling and will want a hybrid card. All of those are viable options, though the larger open air coolers often keep temps and noise lower than blowers (provided you have a large case with other fans helping out).

Overclocking is definitely possible with any of the 1080 cards, and if nothing else you should use EVGA's Precision X OC software or MSI's Afterburner to increase the power limit of your GPU to the maximum—it's a quick and easy way to add an extra 5-10 percent to gaming performance over stock. If you want to increase clock speeds, most 1080 Ti cards top out in the 1.9-2.0GHz range, unless you go with liquid cooling.

Extra Graphics Stuff: Nvidia HB SLI Bridge

You'll also need an HB SLI bridge if you want to get the most out of a GTX 1080 Ti SLI build. The high-end GP104/GP102 Pascal GPUs support two SLI connectors and can use both concurrently. In testing, using two of the old ribbon cables or one of the hard SLI bridges drops performance 5-10 percent compared to the HB SLI bridge (slightly more at 4K).

Just make sure you get the appropriate spacing on the HB SLI bridge—2-slot (no gap between dual-slot graphics cards), 3-slot (one extra slot between the cards) or 4-slot (two extra slots between the cards) bridges are available. For the Gigabyte board, that means you'll want to use the first and third PCIe slots with a 4-slot bridge. That provides more breathing room for the top card, though it leaves only the bottom PCIe slot easily accessible.

What about 3-way or 4-way SLI? Forget about it. Nvidia appears to have abandoned such configurations, and only a few games and benchmarks ever worked well with 3/4 GPUs.

Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-2667 32GB Kit (4x8GB)

You could definitely put more memory into this build (up to 128GB), but for gaming 4x8GB DDR4-2667 is more than sufficient. Corsair makes good memory, and G.Skill, Kingston, and Crucial are safe picks as well. RAM has reached the point where most modules work well, so it's often a question of price—and color, if that's your thing—rather than miniscule performance differences. Higher clocked DDR4 might add a few percent to the overall performance, but the money would be better spent on a faster CPU or GPU, or a larger SSD.

Unfortunately, RAM prices have jumped quite a bit since last summer, due to increased demand from the smartphone industry (and perhaps some collusion among RAM manufacturers to increase profits). The net result is that memory kits that cost $150 last year now cost $250-$300. Ouch. Shop arounds and get whatever brand fits your needs best.

Primary Storage: Samsung 960 Pro 1TB M.2 NVMe

An extreme build like this needs equally extreme storage, and the fastest SSDs are M.2 NVMe drives. Of those, Samsung's 960 Pro rises to the top, beating the previous generation 950 Pro and Intel SSD 750 by up to 10 percent. More importantly, the 960 Pro is available in 1TB and 2TB capacities, along with 512GB. If you really want a ton of fast storage, the 2TB 960 Pro costs about as much as a complete high-end gaming PC.

Will this crazy SSD actually make your PC feel faster? If you're copying files or installing games (or verifying Steam installs), yes. But it's definitely an extravagance, so it's one area where you could definitely get by with something less extreme.

Mass Storage: Samsung 850 Evo 2TB SATA

I know, only 2TB of SATA storage for the secondary drive. Again, I was trying to be somewhat reasonable, but if you really want to go whole hog, check out the 4TB 850 Evo—and maybe pair up several of them in RAID for good measure.

In testing, the 850 Evo 2TB is nearly as fast as the 850 Pro 2TB, mostly because few people will hit storage hard enough for long enough to cause the write performance of the 850 Evo to drop. You could always add a few 10TB HDDs as well, but I'd personally recommend a good NAS with 10GbE rather than adding HDDs to your main PC—because spinning disks are the opposite of extreme performance.

Power Supply: Corsair AX1500i

A wise man once told me to never underestimate the power of the dark supply. Or something like that. The point is, you don't want a crappy PSU taking down the rest of your rig, and when you're putting together the best PC possible that means getting an equally bodacious power supply. The top of the heap is 80 Plus Titanium, and it may be some time before we see anything more efficient.

When it comes to power supplies, the Corsair AX1500i is one of the best around, with a fully digitally controlled design and monitoring software as a bonus. But that's not the main selling point, which is the 1500W of clean power at up to 94 percent efficiency. And you'll need most of that, as the i9-7900X and motherboard can draw around 400W under load, and each GTX 1080 Ti is 250W—more if you run the CPU and GPU overclocked, which is sort of the point of an extreme build.

If you only plan to run a single GPU, or a lower tier CPU (like the i7-7800X), EVGA's SuperNOVA 850 T2 is a great alternative that will save some money. If you want to save even more the SuperNOVA 850 P2 costs about $50 / £50 less and is every bit as good.

Case: Phanteks Enthoo Luxe (Tempered Glass)

Phanteks is a relative newcomer to the PC case scene, with their first Enthoo Primo case debuting in mid-2013. They've since expanded the Enthoo line, and all of the Phanteks cases look great and are highly functional. The Enthoo Luxe has been around a couple of years now, and it remains an excellent choice for a high-end build, with plenty of room for liquid cooling radiators and reservoirs—you can stuff up to four radiators into the case if you're so inclined.

More importantly, there's now a tempered glass version of the case. "A thing of beauty is a joy forever!" Assembly is easy, and the window lets you show off your build, not to mention the RGB lighting.

CPU Cooling: Corsair Hydro H115i

This rig has a beastly CPU, and yes, it needs overclocking. Liquid cooling is highly recommended when you're trying to get the most out of Intel's enthusiast chips, and the new Skylake-X processors recommend liquid cooling as a minimum.

Corsair's H115i is an impressive piece of kit, and since Intel made LGA2066 cooling compatible with LGA2011, you don't need to worry about a new mounting solution (which won't be the case with Threadripper). It features a large 280mm radiator with a pair of 140mm fans, and once everything is installed having a small waterblock on your CPU instead of a massive air cooler makes things look much cleaner. You'll need a large case capable of housing the radiator, naturally, which we already took care of above.

But even with the H115i, you may run into thermal limitations. If you're serious about pushing the i9-7900X to its limits, you'll want to consider going with a fully custom liquid cooling loop. That's beyond the scope of this buying guide, but know that even a good AIO cooler likely won't allow maximum overclocks with Skylake-X.

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